Island People: Portraits and Stories from Nantucket

Island People

Portraits and Stories from Nantucket

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The NHA’s collections contain hundreds of painted portraits and thousands of studio photographs representing people from the island’s past. When you think of painted portraits of Nantucketers, does your mind’s eye imagine stiffly seated sea captains, dressed in sober suits with spyglasses in their hands and little ships sailing across the background? Or men of business in equally sober suits paired with their fashionably dressed wives—canvases seemingly plucked from a large formal parlor? The NHA’s collections certainly contain such images. The museum holds more than one hundred painted portraits of sea captains alone, so many that a visitor to the Whaling Museum in the 1950s complained that they all looked alike, and maybe the curators should put a few back into storage. Well, as regular readers of Historic Nantucket will know, Nantucket history is much more than white whaling captains and wealthy merchant families. It is much more than even just whaling, in fact. The images on these pages represent a selection from the more than one hundred islander likenesses that will be featured this spring in the new exhibition Island People: Portraits and Stories from Nantucket, opening April 22 in the Williams Forsyth Gallery at the Whaling Museum. The exhibition will draw from the NHA’s collections of painted, photographic, and silhouette portraits to highlight both famous and lesser known Nantucketers whose life stories intersect with the themes and currents of the island’s history.

“The images on these pages represent a selection from the more than one hundred islander likenesses that will be featured this spring in the new exhibition.”

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The painting collection begins with the circa 1720 portrait of Mary Gardner Coffin (1670–1767), for whom the Oldest House was built about 1686 [1]. No earlier portrait of a Nantucketer is known, not of any earlier Anglo-American resident nor of any of the Native Wampanoags who lived on island for centuries preceding the English settlement. The island prior to the American Revolution was remote and rural with an economy too small to nourish its own fine-arts traditions. Even as the island’s trade expanded internationally from 1750 on, the increasing cultural dominance of Quakerism, with its doctrine of simplicity, limited the development of a taste for the arts in all their forms, and those island citizens of means who sought finer things had to seek them in mainland cities or abroad. The portraits of mariners Sampson Dyer [2] and Jonathan Colesworthy Jr. [3] bear this out. Dyer (1773–1843), a son of mixed African and Wampanoag parentage, traveled more than once to China on Nantucket trading voyages. Like many American traders, including other Nantucketers, he hired the Cantonese artist Spoilum to paint his portrait in 1802. Colesworthy (1772–1849) commanded the Lady Adams of Nantucket on voyages to Calcutta in 1805 and the Mediterranean in 1807, and somewhere along the way sat for the Dutch painter Charles Delin. Delin’s picture captures a typical Nantucket sea captain: young and sunburnt. As Quakerism fragmented into sects after the War of 1812 and the whale fishery regained its footing, a greater taste for the decorative arts took hold on Nantucket. A few native-born painters are known from this time, including Hannah Macy, who painted Judith Folger Macy (1729–1819) in the last year of her life [4, in a copy by W. Ferdinand Macy]. Judith Macy married young, soon lost her first husband to illness, remarried, then bore ten children over a twenty-year span. Her son Obed, the

OPENING APRIL 22 Whaling Museum, Williams Forsyth Gallery

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island merchant and historian, described his mother as “generally healthy and of a strong constitution & remarkably industrious.” A surviving daybook she started in her fifties bears this out. This portrait also illustrates Obed’s further remark that “the last 15 years of her life was mostly spent in knitting & reading the Bible & other religious books.” The small portrait of merchant George F. Coggeshall (1804–1868) [5] was probably the largest image he could afford when he was in his thirties, hinting at the fact that the island’s whaling prosperity did not reach uniformly into all corners of island life. Coggeshall was keeper of Great Point Lighthouse later in life, and with his family rescued the crew of a wrecked schooner on Great Point in 1865.

Captain James A. Beebe’s successful whaling career allowed him to afford an ample portrait of his wife, Lydia (1838–1910), and their daughter Alice, in 1874 [6]. Lydia sailed with John on two whaling voyages between 1863 and 1869, one of an increasing number of captain’s wives who took to the sea beginning in the 1820s. Early photography opened up portrait making to a wider swath of the island population. It is thanks to the camera that we have images of working-class islanders beginning in the 1850s. Dorcas Honorable (ca. 1775–1855) [7] found work as a domestic but lived in poverty at the end of her life. Her image, originally a daguerreotype but reproduced here in a carte de visite meant to be collected, is one of the precious few we have showing a Nantucket Wampanoag person in the nineteenth century. A carpenter whose name we have not yet discovered [8] poses proudly with selected tools of his trade. If sea captains could have their spyglasses in their portraits, why shouldn’t carpenters have their tools?

The image of Hannah Gardner (1788–1867) [9] is based on a photograph, which her seafaring husband handed to a painter in Hong Kong to copy in about 1885. Hannah was born in Dunkirk, France, when Nantucket families

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worked to set up a whaling industry there. She returned to Nantucket as a girl, married a sailor, and raised eleven children. She and her husband, devout Quakers, are best remembered today for their bravery in hiding Arthur and Mary Cooper and their children from slave-hunters in 1822.

This exceptional tintype [10] is one of the most arresting portrait photographs in the NHA collection. Photographic portraits of nineteenth-century Black Nantucketers are rare, and none are as striking as the likeness of this distinguished man gazing self-assuredly at the camera, his hands clasping his cane and his earrings glinting in the light. The scene of retired whaling captain John Pitman and his wife Phebe Folger Pitman in their ’Sconset parlor [11], the work of visiting artist George Newell Bowers in 1889, conjures an atmosphere of retired bliss after 64 years of marriage. She weaves and he reads the paper, quintessential activities of a quiet life in a rural village— and the very image of quaint Nantucket that was a major selling point of the island as a summer destination in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

OPENING APRIL 22 Whaling Museum, Williams Forsyth Gallery